Bookless in Baghdad

by Shashi Tharoor

  Of course, there is no shame in acknowledging that English is a legacy of the colonial connection, but one no less useful and valid than the railways, the telegraphs, or the law courts that were also left behind by the British. Historically, English helped us find our Indian voice: that great Indian nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru wrote his Discovery of India in English. But the eclipse of that dreadful phrase “the Indo-Anglian novel” has occurred precisely because Indian writers have evolved well beyond the British connection to their native land. The days when Indians wrote novels in English either to flatter or rail against their colonial masters are well behind us. Now we have Indians in India writing as naturally about themselves in English as Australians or South Africans do, and their tribe has been supplemented by India's rich diaspora in the United States, which has already produced a distinctive crop of impressive novelists, with Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards to their names.

  Their addresses don't matter, because writers really live inside their heads and on the page, and geography is merely a circumstance. They write secure of themselves in their heritage of diversity, and they write free of the anxiety of audience, for theirs are narratives that appeal as easily to Americans as to Indians — and indeed to readers irrespective of ethnicity.

  Surely that's the whole point about literature — that for a body of fiction to constitute a literature it must rise above its origins, its setting, even its language, to render accessible to a reader anywhere some insight into the human condition. Read my books and those of other Indian writers not because we're Indian, not necessarily because you are interested in India, but because they are worth reading in and of themselves. And each time you pick up one of my books, ask not for whom I write: I write for you.

  So — to go back to the question with which we began — does my text belong to me? I write, as George Bernard Shaw said, for the same reason a cow gives milk: it's inside me, it's got to come out, and in a real sense I would suffer if I couldn't. It's the way I express my reaction to the world I live in, see around me, and try to imagine. It would be as futile to claim ownership of it as for a cow to assert she owns the milk she has provided. No, dear reader, the text no longer belongs to me. It belongs to you.